It was bad enough when, installing some piece of software, you got presented with a screen full of legal gibberish that you were required to respond to by clicking on one of two buttons: I AGREE or I DON’T AGREE (Who ever clicked on the second button?)

Now, always striving to add even more needless, irritating tasks to our lives, the makers of software have come up with “agreements” of such length and complexity they won’t fit on to a single screen. An agreement of this new type has to be scrolled through, using a little scroll bar at one side: and the fiends have so arranged things that you can’t click on the AGREE/DON’T AGREE buttons until you have actually scrolled to the bottom of the gibberish.

I now no longer have any heart to repeat my traditional family joke. When we load a DVD into the player to watch a family movie, I traditionally hit the PAUSE button while the FBI WARNING is being displayed. The kids traditionally make howls of complaint, to which I traditonally reply: “But I haven’t finished reading the warning notice yet!” The way things are going, the DVD makers will figure some way to prevent you advancing to the actual movie until you’ve passed a test of comprehension of the FBI warning.

Dick the Butcher got it right.